Wild Side Farms

When you live in the melting pot that is a coastal city in Florida, it’s helpful to find someone who was born and raised here to help you acclimatize. In the same vein, it’s important to cultivate and encourage plants that are native to the area and therefore naturally contribute to the preservation of biodiversity.

In Miami Beach and West Palm Beach they’re planting shadier native alternatives to the ubiquitous nonnative palm trees that line those moneyed streets as decorative (but essentially useless) symbols of the tropics. In Sarasota we are fortunate to have our own “guardians of the biodiverse galaxy” thanks to Florida Native Plants Nursery and Landscaping, and their tenant, Wild Side Farms, tucked away behind the nursery—in a secret garden that would move Frances Hodgson Burnett to tears.

Allie Harris started Wild Side Farms with her then-partner, Spencer Collins, in a tiny greenhouse in downtown Sarasota’s Laurel Park. Like most plants that begin life in a small pot they soon outgrew their surroundings—and moved to an old farmhouse on a quarter acre of land. Allie and Spencer wanted to focus on their style of gardening that echoed the natural environment that they lived in.

“Nothing was neat and ordered because nature isn’t neat and ordered,” says Allie. “I wanted to focus on natural, living soils. I wanted to grow food rather than going to the grocery store, because the dirt under us nourishes us.”

Allie and Spencer’s daughter, Ruby Collins, was born and raised here (you could say she’s a native plant) and she has grown up under the tables at the Sarasota Farmers Market under the watchful but encouraging eye of a close-knit community of naturalists cultivating pollinators and foraging for sustainability. “We need to plant things that support biodiversity to feed the bees and the birds and, in turn, ourselves.”

Allie began to get into medicinal plants and herbs, figuring out which ones thrive here and how to process them. She loves to bring greenery into urban spaces and maintains restaurant gardens for Owen’s Fish Camp, Ionie, and the Artisan Cheese Company (to name but a few of my personal favorites). She also installs landscape gardens and assists people who wish to have their own edible or medicinal gardens.

Allie is grateful to the women who have given her space behind their nursery to expand her roots even further: Annie Schiller and her mother, Laurel. I meet Allie in the garden by the towering greenhouse that she built in 2020 with physical help from friends and financial help from a grassroots funding campaign. There are monarch butterflies landing all around us and the sun is filtering through the greenery highlighting little pops of color: purple flowers, tiny red tomatoes, and 6-year-old Ruby’s flaxen braid. There are no wind chimes but I imagine that I can hear them anyway, the sound that since my own childhood has signified the presence of magic.

I meet Allie’s green-eyed gaze with my own, and she offers a small shrug and a smile “I don’t want to overshare, but it feels insane that this is my reality. You know how there’s always ups, and downs, and setbacks, and you don’t always know that things are going to work out? Well, being out here feels like everything is falling into place.” It’s hard not to believe that the elements around us feel the same way.

> Wild Side Farms: Florida Native Plants & Landscapimg
730 Myakka Rd, Sarasota; 941-780-0959; wildsidefarms.org